Where the One-Eyed Man is King

It’s always much easier to go with the consensus rather than slowly carve your own path in the wilderness. The potential of having devastating consequences or gratifying rewards are on both ends of the volitional spectrum.

Mob mentality is an evolutionary mechanism — Being in a group simply ensures a greater chance of survival. It’s therefore not surprising that the trade-off of monophobia is personal development.

How much strain is exacted on one’s individual standards when one relies on group experiences and group responsibility? This certainly applies to having a personal sense of morality. At what point does the group’s collective actions and decisions ‘peer pressure’ the individual out of their own moral compass?

Wanting to belong and yet distinguish oneself in the ‘social organism’ also makes its members either push wheel backwards or forwards. Therefore, a group will always precariously sit at the threshold of communally improving or spiraling into decline (I’m not talking about a band). Unfortunately, this also makes the group elect individuals who do not deviate too much from the consensus to represent them. It certainly has appropriate occasions, but this is also why we live lives of half-truths, pleasantries and gray areas to put things nicely.

Contemporary society’s ‘law’ has made killing each other terribly inconvenient. Yet, it’s not uncommon to see those who hang onto each other for dear life, simultaneously tear each other apart. This contradiction about belonging to the crowd without losing oneself fosters mental tension that drains vitality. Are these strained social relationships manifestations of a new evolutionary roadblock?